This is purely delightful

I don't know if they were inspired by the Sound of Music stunt last year at Antwerp's Central Station, but a couple months ago, the Opera Company of Philadelphia performed "Brindisi" from Verdi's La Traviata in the Reading Terminal Market, during their Italian Festival. Just watch, this is too good for words:

In uncertain times, worship

Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,

Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.

Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.

I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.

Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.

Fly, eagle, fly

Trying, frying, fragmented day. This is good:

Note: before the song proper starts, there's a (sort-of-related) spoken clip and a neat instrumental bit by Mark Gersmehl.

One more song

just because I've been thinking about this one lately:

A little music for a Sunday evening

One of my friends on Facebook posted the chorus to "Revive Us Again" as her status, and now I have Ashley Cleveland's version stuck in my head. Of course, it doesn't take much to get that one stuck in my head; nor do I regret it, because it's a great version. It's also well worth sharing—so, without further ado:

As long as I'm at it, I've been meaning to post Moses Hogan's phenomenal arrangement of "The Battle of Jericho" ever since my wife discovered it a couple weeks ago; since it's in the same general vein, albeit a choral arrangement rather than solo voice with a blues-rock band, now's as good a time as any.

Song of the Week

This song gets me every time.

Legacy

I don't mind if you've got something nice to say about me;
I enjoy an accolade like the rest.
You could take my picture, hang it in a gallery
Of all the Who's Whos and So-and-Sos
That used to be the best at such-and-such;
It wouldn't matter much.

I won't lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights;
We all need an "Atta boy" or "Atta girl."
But in the end I'd like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this world

I want to leave a legacy—
How will they remember me?
Did I choose to love?
Did I point to You enough
To make a mark on things?
I want to leave an offering
A child of mercy and grace
Who blessed your name unapologetically
And leave that kind of legacy.

I don't have to look too far or too long a while
To make a lengthly list of all that I enjoy;
It's an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile,
Where moth and rust, thieves and such
Will soon enough destroy.

Chorus

Not well traveled, not well read;
Not well-to-do, or well-bred;
Just want to hear instead,
"Well done, good and faithful one."

Chorus

Words and music: Nichole Nordeman
© 2002 Ariose Music
From the album Woven & Spun, by Nichole Nordeman

On the insipidity of pop music

Does all pop music sound the same to you? Well, as the Aussie comedy/music trio Axis of Awesome points out, there's a reason for that (note: language warning):

(Update: I discovered recently that the version of this clip I originally posted, which has the song titles included, is actually an edited version of their performance—it had about a minute removed, as well as their introduction on the stage—so I've changed the video to one which includes the whole performance. For the shorter version with song titles, go here.)

Now, if you're like me, this immediately reminded you of something else—this bit from the American musical comedian Rob Paravonian (language warning here as well), which takes the same idea a bit further:

Between the two, I'm not sure there's all that much left to say.

A lyrical reaction to Sunday's vote

I have yet to find anything that better expresses my reaction to the passage of ObamaPelosiCare, and to the whole process leading up to it, than this. (Click on the title to see the video, which is the best part; courtesy of EMI, embedding is disabled.)

Here it Goes Again

It could be ten, but then again, I can't remember
Half an hour since a quarter to four.
Throw on your clothes, the second side of Surfer Rosa,
And you leave me with my jaw on the floor.

Just when you think that you're in control,
Just when you think that you've got a hold,
Just when you get on a roll,
Here it goes, here it goes, here it goes again.
Oh, here it goes again.
I should have known, should have known, should have known again,
But here it goes again.
Oh, here it goes again.

It starts out easy, something simple, something sleazy,
Something inching past the edge of reserve.
Now through the lines of the cheap venetian blinds
Your car is pulling off of the curb.

Chorus

I guess there's got to be a break in the monotony,
But *****, when it rains how it pours.
Throw on your clothes, the second side of Surfer Rosa,
And you leave me, yeah, you leave me.

Chorus

Words and music: Damien Kulash Jr.
© 2005 OK Go Publishing
From the album Oh No, by OK Go

Copyright, corporate shortsightedness, and the free market

I have to admit, I’d never heard of the group OK Go until a month or two ago when my brother-in-law played me the video for their song “This Too Shall Pass,” from the album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. I enjoyed it, but the group didn’t really stick in my consciousness until they released a second video for the same song, featuring a most remarkable Rube Goldberg machine:

At first, the most interesting question to me was, did they really shoot that in a single take? (Answer: yes, but it took them over sixty tries.) With that answered, I discovered that in truth, the most interesting question is this: why did they make a second video to the song when the first one (featuring the Notre Dame marching band) was perfectly fine? As Dylan Tweney wrote on the Wired website,

OK Go developed a reputation for making catchy, viral videos four years ago with the homemade video for “Here It Goes Again,” which features the band members dancing around on treadmills. The company ran afoul of music label EMI’s restrictive licensing rules, which required YouTube to disable embedding, cutting views to 1/10 of their previous level. Now, the new video is up—and it’s embeddable, so the band seems to have won this round with its label—and is already generating buzz on YouTube and on Twitter.

Actually, it’s not so much that OK Go won the round as it is that they cut ties with their label and went independent. As one commenter on another OK Go video (“We’re Sorry YouTube”) put it,

OK Go got into a huge fight with EMI and Capitol over how their viral videos were distributed. They wanted You Tube viewers to be able to watch the videos without worries about the labels coming down on people who posted. In the end, they ended up leaving EMI and Capitol and forming their own label. In fact, they were so mad that's why they created a second video for “This Too Shall Pass” with the Rube Goldberg machinery. This video is just their humorous way of dealing.

In the cheap political calculus that floats around, it’s usually assumed that because conservatives support big business, big business is politically conservative—which in economic terms means in favor of deregulation and the free market. In truth, though, this is a long way off the mark; big business is very much in favor of regulation, because regulation is the simplest way of squashing competition. It’s certainly easier than actually having to outcompete people. Thus the approach of big companies like EMI to something like YouTube is generally to try to regulate it by one means or another so as to maintain as much control as possible over how their material is used; they want to ensure that nothing happens that they don’t approve, and that they don’t miss any opportunity to make money.

Now, I don’t want to minimize the importance of intellectual property and intellectual property rights; it’s morally wrong when people who create things don’t profit from their creations as they should, and I’ll even grant that the companies which connect musicians and authors and other creative types to those who want to buy their creations should also make an appropriate profit for their work. But the approach EMI took here is extremely short-sighted, because it treats the economic process as a zero-sum game; thus it assumes that if someone is able to, say, watch an OK Go video someplace other than on YouTube (i.e., someplace that doesn’t have an ad for EMI up right next to the video), that represents a lost profit opportunity which can never be recovered. That simply isn’t true.

Rather, what OK Go understands and EMI (like many other corporations) doesn’t is that giving things away can often be the best way to make money. The best illustration of this I know of is the success of the Baen Free Library at Baen Books. Baen, founded by the late Jim Baen, isn’t a huge publishing company by any means, but it’s a significant one in the world of science fiction; and spurred on by Eric Flint, one of their authors, they opted years ago to start making a significant number of their titles available free online. As Flint explained at the time,

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. . . .

Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market—especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people—is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom. . . .

We expect this Baen Free Library to make us money by selling books.

How? As I said above, for the same reason that any kind of book distribution which provides free copies to people has always, throughout the history of publishing, eventually rebounded to the benefit of the author. . . .

I don’t know any author, other than a few who are—to speak bluntly—cretins, who hears about people lending his or her books to their friends, or checking them out of a library, with anything other than pleasure. Because they understand full well that, in the long run, what maintains and (especially) expands a writer’s audience base is that mysterious magic we call: word of mouth.

Word of mouth, unlike paid advertising, comes free to the author—and it’s ten times more effective than any kind of paid advertising, because it’s the one form of promotion which people usually trust.

That being so, an author can hardly complain—since the author paid nothing for it either. And it is that word of mouth, percolating through the reading public down a million little channels, which is what really puts the food on an author’s table. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. . . .

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the “gap” between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.

Of course, some might be skeptical: is it really working? Well, about a year and a half after Flint launched the Library, he wrote an extended piece showing that the Library had actually boosted sales of the books Baen gave away—by quite a significant amount, actually.

The Library's track record shows clearly that the traditional “encryption/enforcement policy” which has been followed thus far by most of the publishing industry is just plain stupid, as well as unconscionable from the viewpoint of infringing on personal liberties. . . .

Making one or a few titles of an author's writings available for free electronically in the Free Library seems to have no other impact, certainly over time, than to increase that author's general audience recognition-and thereby, indirectly if not directly, the sales of his or her books.

I believe it also—I leave it up to each individual to weigh this out for themselves—places such authors on what you might call the side of the angels in this dispute. For me, at least, this side of the matter is even more important than the practical side. It grates me to see the way powerful corporate interests have been steadily twisting the copyright laws and encroaching on personal liberties in order to shore up their profit margins-all the more so when their profit problems are a result of their own stupidity and short-sighted greed in the first place.

I will leave you all with one final anecdote. Napster, of course, is held up as the ultimate “villain” with regard to the so-called problem of online piracy. The letters I received as Librarian were addressed to the issue of books, not music. Yet I was struck by how often—perhaps in a hundred letters—the writers would mention their own experience with Napster. And, in every instance, stated that their purchases of CDs increased as a result of Napster—for the good and simple reason that because Napster enabled them to sample musicians, they bought music they would not otherwise have been tempted to buy because CDs are too expensive to experiment with.

Not enough? Well, check out what Janis Ian had to say. Or consider a personal anecdote: a few days ago, Ray Ortlund put up a blog post with a video of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s song “Pride of Man.” An embedded video, note. I’d never heard of the group before, and neither had Sara; we now own a copy of their “Best of” album, and I think there’s pretty good odds we’ll buy more before all is said and done. If the record labels had their way (or if, at any rate, they all operated like EMI), that sale would never have happened.

Yes, copyright is important. Yes, intellectual property is important. The laborer is worthy of his hire, after all. But using copyright as a club, seeking ever greater regulation of people’s behavior out of fear of what they might do, isn’t just philosophically problematic—it’s unprofitable, because it has a dampening effect and a chilling effect on the very market on which companies depend. A receding tide lowers all boats, but a rising tide lifts them. Just ask Eric Flint.

Song of the Week II

I posted Greg Scheer's "A Mark of Grace" earlier because I admire what he accomplished in that song, but it's far from the only new song I learned at the Worship Symposium last week; there were several, of which my favorite is this one, which is still stuck fast in my head from last Thursday morning:

Creation Sings

Creation sings the Father's song;
He calls the sun to wake the dawn
And run the course of day
Till evening falls in crimson rays.
His fingerprints in flakes of snow,
His breath upon this spinning globe,
He charts the eagle's flight;
Commands the newborn baby's cry.

Hallelujah! Let all creation stand and sing,
"Hallelujah!" Fill the earth with songs of worship;
Tell the wonders of creation's King.

Creation gazed upon His face;
The ageless One in time's embrace
Unveiled the Father's plan
Of reconciling God and man.
A second Adam walked the earth,
Whose blameless life would break the curse,
Whose death would set us free
To live with Him eternally.

Chorus

Creation longs for His return,
When Christ shall reign upon the earth;
The bitter wars that rage
Are birth pains of a coming age.
When He renews the land and sky,
All heav'n will sing and earth reply
With one resplendent theme: The glories of our God and King!

Chorus

Words and music: Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, and Stuart Townend
© 2008 Thankyou Music
Recorded on the album Awaken the Dawn, by Keith and Kristyn Getty

Other people's work

I've been meaning to repost this poem my wife posted a while ago, one which she found on the group writing blog Novel Matters; it's by one of the contributors there, Latayne C. Scott. I lack the talent to be a professional musician—and, to be honest, the practice habits—but I love music, and one of the best things about living in Winona Lake is getting to hear some of the best musicians in the world play to the glory of God. Souls in their fingers, indeed.

Opus Envy

I watch his fingers
Teasing the piano
As he caresses the ivory teeth
It purrrrrrrs
Harder now—he strikes
A glancing blow off the black fang

An answering roar

ah Rachmaninoff
just because my soul is not in
my fingertips does not
mean I do not have
one

Thank God for God (a Thanksgiving meditation)

Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there;
the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

—Job 1:21

During the time of Napoleon’s reign in France, there was a political prisoner by the name of Charnet. That is to say, there was a man named Charnet who had unintentionally offended the emperor by some remark or another and been thrown in prison to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”

But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”

The guards saw what was happening; they talked about it amongst themselves, they told their wives, and the story spread, until finally somehow it came to the ears of the Empress Josephine. The story moved her, and she became so convinced that no man who loved a flower in this way could be dangerous that she appealed to Napoleon, and persuaded her husband to relent and set Charnet free. When he left his cell, he took the little flower with him in a little flowerpot, and on the pot he wrote Matthew 6:30: “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?”

There's a lesson in Charnet's story—the lesson of Job, I think. I struggled for years to make sense of that verse, until I found the key in an observation made by Rev. Wayne Brouwer, a Christian Reformed pastor in Holland, Michigan. Rev. Brouwer, writing on Psalm 22, muses, “Maybe it’s not that believers are grateful to God but that those who are grateful to God are the ones who truly believe him. Only those of us who are truly thankful are able to ride out the storms of life which might otherwise destroy us. Only those who have an attitude of gratitude know what it means to believe.” In other words, the root of our faith is gratitude.

We talk about the patience of Job, but in reality Job showed very little patience; what he did show was great faith, and that faith was firmly rooted in his determination to remain grateful for all the Lord had given him despite his losses. Thus he can say here, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”; thus he can affirm at another point, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth . . . in my flesh I shall see God.” In the same way, once Charnet found something for which to be thankful, that little plant struggling through the hard, dry earth, he found Someone to thank, and his faith grew back along with that little plant. Before that point, faith was impossible for him, because there was no root to sustain it.

If our gratitude depends on the number of our gifts exceeding a certain critical mass, if we miss the Giver for the gifts, then we have a shallow faith indeed. The example of Job calls us to a deeper gratitude, and a deeper faith, a faith that is able to see God and give thanks even when things aren’t going well. This is the faith the poet Joyce Kilmer expressed when he wrote, “Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife . . ./Thank God for the stress and the pain of life./And, oh, thank God for God.”

That’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? Thank God for God. Thank God, as Psalm 23 does, that even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he is there with us. Thank God, as Psalm 22 does, that he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted. Thank God, as Job teaches us, that we don’t have to bury our grief and anger, but can bring them to God honestly; for Job challenges God fiercely, but his challenge is rooted in his faith, and so at the end God says of him, “He is my servant, and he has spoken of me what is right.” Thank God for God, because that is the root and beginning of faith; to quote Wayne Brouwer again, “Only the grateful believe, and faith itself which seems to soar in times of prosperity needs the strength of thankfulness to carry it through the dark night of the soul.”

One man who well knew the truth of this was Martin Rinkard, a Lutheran who was the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. This was the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and in that year Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkard’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinker wrote these words:

Now Thank We All Our God

Now thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother's arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God
Through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts
And blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in his grace,
And guide us when perplexed,
And free us from all ills
In this world and the next.

All praise and thanks to God
The Father now be given,
The Son, and Him who reigns
With them in highest heaven,
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.

Words: Martin Rinkart; translated by Catherine Winkworth
Music: Johann Crüger
NUN DANKET, 6.7.6.7.6.6.6.6.

This is a repost from November 2007.

Give me a home among the gum trees

One of my enduring memories of Regent is one Fall Retreat (my first year there, I think), seeing the school's entire Australian contingent, led by our utterly irrepressible Australian Pentecostal NT professor Dr. Rikki Watts, perform the song "Home Among the Gum Trees"—as a sort of chorus line, no less. I've had that rattling around in my brain today for some reason, and decided to post it. It says a lot about Australia and its people that this performance was from the memorial service for Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, who I'm sure would have mightily approved.

This is cool in more ways than I can count

HT: my wife

I think these folks are right to say, "the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do"; but honestly, that only begins to bring out all the lessons from this one. Imagine the teaching opportunity of staircases like that, what they would do for people's understanding and appreciation of music . . . we could use many, many more of these.

Though Hap is right—our kids being who they are, if we had a staircase like that on our regular route, we'd never get anywhere on time.

A bit o' the genius o' the Celts

to brighten your Sunday evening. My wife set me off looking for a video of a particular piece by the Irish pianist, composer and scholar of world music Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin; I didn't find that particular one, but I did find a few other videos of him performing, including the one below. That set me off wandering from video to video (since everyone knows YouTube videos are like Lays potato chips—no one can eat just one), and I added a couple others to the post just for fun.

Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Mel Mercier (not sure of the tune)

Silly Wizard: Donald McGillavry

Kate Rusby: Sir Eglamore

Mary Travers, RIP

It's been a bad month for musicians, I guess (at least those in the folk-pop-rock range); I missed this, but Mary Travers died last Wednesday at the age of 72 after a five-year battle with leukemia. She was of course best known for her time with Peter, Paul and Mary, which was one of the premier groups of the American folk-music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and which is credited with helping to boost Bob Dylan's career. I grew up on their music, and I still love it; all things in this world come to an end, but it's still sad to see it happen.

HT: Jerry Wilson

In honor of Kerry Livgren

Thanks to a commenter on the previous post for tipping me off: Livgren suffered a major stroke three weeks ago. It was bad enough that he had surgery that morning to remove a clot from the language centers of his brain; the surgery went well, and the reports on his recovery (posted on Kansas' official band website; click on "Kerry L. update") are positive. Please be praying.

Since I've been on a Kerry Livgren kick anyway, I thought I'd post a few more videos—this time from the AD phase of his career.

Progress

The Fury

Lead Me to Reason

Carry on

It's way too early in the morning to be up, especially after a long and draining weekend; but up I am, watching Kansas videos on YouTube and working my way towards doing something productive with the time. For the moment, though, I'm just happy to have found these:

Carry On Wayward Son

Point of Know Return

Notes and neurons

I was thinking about this this morning and realized I'd never gotten around to posting it; this is wonderful. It is indeed, as Bobby McFerrin says, the power of the pentatonic scale—and of music in general, I think; it's also a remarkable illustration of the beauty of the order of God's creation, and of the ways in which we're made for, and made to respond to, that order, even in our fallen state.

The joy of the Irish

My thanks to Jared Wilson for posting this. I love the Chieftains (and like the Corrs quite well too, for that matter), and this was just a lovely thing to see.